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Twenty years have passed since 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama disappeared on May 30, 2005, during a senior trip to Aruba with her high school friends, but the Holloway family’s private investigator says there are still many unanswered questions in the case.

In 2023, 36-year-old Dutch national Joran van der Sloot, the primary suspect in Holloway’s disappearance and murder, confessed to bashing the teenager’s head with a brick and dumping her body in the ocean after she refused his advances. 

“I smash her head in with it completely,” van der Sloot said in an Oct. 3, 2023, interview with federal authorities. “Her face basically, you know, collapses in. Even though it’s dark, I can see her face is collapsed in.”

TJ Ward, a private investigator hired by Holloway’s family in 2005 and again in 2010, does not believe he acted alone.

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Joran van der Sloot and Natalee Holloway (Shelby County Jail | AP)

“Twenty years, can you believe that?” he told Fox News Digital in an interview this week, marking two decades since the 18-year-old graduate vanished from Carlos’n Charlie’s, a restaurant and nightclub in Oranjestad, Aruba. “She had a bright future. She got a scholarship to go to college for medical school – unbelievable.”

Ward does work for a voice analysis company based in Israel, which paid the private investigator to travel to Aruba after Holloway disappeared. There, he met with her parents as well as the FBI and Aruba authorities. Ward said he used the voice analysis technology on van de Sloot’s existing interviews at the time and determined that he was lying to authorities and to the public.

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Natalee Holloway was last seen alive in Aruba. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

“We knew numerous times along the course of the investigation [and] over the last few years that Joran van der Sloot was not telling the truth,” Ward said. “Thereafter, we started locating witnesses and talking and finding information that was going on with the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, and we knew a lot of the information that Van der Sloot was communicating was not true.”

Holloway was last seen leaving Carlos’n Charlie’s with van der Sloot and two other men, brothers Satish and Deepak Kalpoe, on the evening of May 30, two decades ago as of Friday. The three men were considered early suspects in the case.

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Dutch national Joran van der Sloot arrives for a hearing at the Lurigancho prison in Lima, Peru, on Jan. 11, 2011. (ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP via Getty Images)

Police arrested van der Sloot but eventually released him due to a lack of evidence. Authorities eyed the same suspects again in 2007 after uncovering “new facts” but wound up releasing them once more.

Holloway’s remains have never been found.

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The Holiday Inn resort in Noord, Aruba, is where Natalee Holloway stayed in 2005 before she disappeared. (Mega for Fox News Digital)

Five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance, van der Sloot killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a wealthy Peruvian family who crossed paths with the killer on May 30, 2010.

Van der Sloot later confessed to killing her in a fit of anger after she learned about his connection to Holloway’s disappearance. They had met earlier in her father’s casino in Lima, and he beat her to death in his hotel room the following morning.